There’s a sound that will haunt anyone who grew up online in the 90s: the screech of a dial-up modem connecting. It was the sound of a secret door opening. You were about to enter a world that most people didn’t even know existed. It felt like magic. It felt like ours.
Then, somewhere around the turn of the millennium, the door swung wide open. And everyone walked in.
I stumbled on a Hacker News post this week that stopped me cold. A long-time software engineer posted an interactive story about his life on IRC in the 90s. He described leaving the internet before 2000 because he thought he needed a “real-world life” — that only nerds were online. But when he came back, the whole world was there. The irony? He didn’t leave the internet. The internet left him.
The internet wasn’t ruined by trolls or algorithms. It was ruined by your mom joining Facebook.
Let that sink in. For everyone who remembers the early days of chat rooms, Usenet, and IRC, the internet was a place of radical belonging. It was messy, slow, and full of weirdos — but it was our mess. You earned your identity online. You didn’t just sign up. You built a reputation, a persona, a tribe. The barrier to entry was high: you needed a modem, a phone line, and a willingness to type commands. That friction kept out the masses. And that’s exactly what made it magical.
Now, the internet is a utility. You don’t “go online” anymore — you’re always online. Every human with a smartphone is a digital citizen. The secret club is now a public square. And the joy of discovery, of stumbling into a weird corner of the web, has been replaced by algorithmic feeds that show you what you already want to see.
We didn’t destroy the internet. We just invited too many people to the party.
The author’s story is a perfect microcosm of this shift. He spent years “hacking” — not just coding, but living inside the machine. He wrote about his experiences, and then built an interactive browser-based game to let readers relive them. He wanted to share the joy. But the very act of sharing it, of making it accessible, is a paradox. The joy came from the exclusivity. The feeling of being part of a secret society. You can’t bottle that. You can’t distribute it.
This is the painful truth that nostalgia merchants never tell you: the internet’s golden age wasn’t a place. It was a feeling of being early. And once everyone shows up, that feeling evaporates.
Think about it. When was the last time you felt genuinely surprised by something online? When was the last time you found a community that felt like home, not just a feed? The normalisation of the internet has turned us all into performers. We curate lives, we chase likes, we measure our worth in engagement metrics. The 90s internet was a playground. The 2020s internet is a job.
I’m not saying it was better then. It wasn’t. The 90s internet was also a cesspool of racism, piracy, and creepy dudes. But it was honest. It didn’t pretend to be something it wasn’t. You logged on, you talked to strangers, you argued about Star Trek, and then you logged off. The real world waited. Now the real world is the online world, and there’s no off switch.
The real tragedy isn’t that the internet became mainstream. It’s that we forgot what it felt like to belong to something that didn’t want us to belong.
Perhaps the author’s interactive story is a gift. It’s a portal back to a time when the internet was a frontier, not a franchise. If you were there, you’ll recognise every pixel. If you weren’t, you’ll wonder what you missed. Either way, it’s a reminder that the magic of the internet wasn’t in the technology. It was in the scarcity. The effort. The feeling of being part of a secret that most people would never understand.
Maybe the old internet isn’t dead. It’s just hiding in the corners where the cool kids still hang out. Go find your IRC client. Or sit in silence for a moment and remember what it felt like to be part of something that wasn’t for everyone.
You can’t go back. But you can remember why you were there in the first place.
FAQ
Q: Is this article just romanticizing the past?
A: Partially. But the point isn't that the 90s internet was perfect — it's that the experience of being early, of hacking and discovering, is fundamentally different from being part of a mass audience. The feeling of scarcity and effort created a sense of belonging that algorithmic feeds can't replicate.
Q: What's the practical takeaway for someone who never used IRC?
A: Recognize that the internet you know is a product, not a community. The real value comes from seeking out small, niche spaces — not just consuming what the algorithm feeds you. Go find a weird forum, a Discord server, or a Mastodon instance. The magic is still there, but you have to work for it.
Q: Isn't it elitist to say the internet was better when it was exclusive?
A: Yes, it's elitist. But that's the point. The early internet's value came from its exclusivity. The moment it became a utility, it lost the very thing that made it transformative. That doesn't mean it's worse now — just different. And acknowledging that loss is a necessary step toward building something better.